The Goldman fraud suit continues to dominate the media cycle. After the initial shock of the US government actually doing something to hold Wall Street accountable, the business press — led by Goldman Sachs and their lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell — has turned to questions about the merits of the suit. Today, the New York Times gave A1 real estate to a piece headlined “A Difficult Path In Goldman Case.”

The article opens by saying that the SEC is “pursuing an unusual claim that could be difficult to prove in court” according to legal experts. But the article only quotes one legal expert clearly criticizing the substance of the case: Allen Ferrell, a professor at Harvard Law School. According to his CV, Ferrell has been engaged as an “expert for large financial institution involving subprime-related litigation (details confidential).”

This is clearly a potential conflict, but the entire article appears to be based around Ferrell’s lone, critical quote. This is irresponsible journalism, especially considering the landmark significance of the Goldman suit. So I wrote the following letter to the Times ombudsman to alert him to the conflict and request a proper correction/disclosure:

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The New York Times ran a great story on Tuesday about former AIG chief Maurice Greenberg’s latest venture, the C.V. Starr empire. Reporter Mary Williams Walsh links Greenberg’s new success to the Treasury Department capping executive pay at AIG last week: “That may hasten the exodus of A.I.G.’s talent, sending more refugees into Mr. Greenberg’s arms, since C. V. Starr is free to pay whatever it wants.”

Cornelius Vander Starr, a California-born entrepreneur, was the first American businessperson to sell insurance to the Chinese. The blanket company C.V. Starr International was established in 1919 in Shanghai and AIG would eventually grow out of it. Starr would eventually give Maurice Greenberg his first job in the insurance industry at AIG in 1962. Starr became Greenberg’s mentor and was handed the company after Starr died in 1968. After President Nixon opened up relations with China, Greenberg visited China for the first time in 1975. He would run AIG until 2005, when he resigned amid fraud allegations. Good thing he had the Starr empire to fall back on.

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On Sunday, The New York Times ran “Bill Gross of Pimco is on Treasury’s Speed-Dial,” a lengthy article on the cozy relations between PIMCO executives Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian and the Treasury Department. The piece had the confessional tone that is commonplace these days on the Times business page. To seek absolution for rapaciously self-interested actions, executives seem eager to tell all to Times reporters. Once the conflicts of interest and manipulation are out in the open, they lose their shock factor and can continue unabated.

The article traced the origin of PPIP to El-Erian, a much-hyped bond manager and emerging markets specialist. Although El-Erian’s plan for shedding toxic assets wasn’t adopted immediately, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner eventually warmed to it, and El-Erian and Gross helped shape it at every step. Now PIMCO appears first in line to benefit from the sweet terms they drew up for the government, should any bank ever decide to participate in the program.

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Following on Saturday’s weather balloon detailing the Wall Street pay of Larry Summers, today the Times ran a piece on Summers’s work at the hedge fund DE Shaw. Replete with color from inside sources and spare in its critical content, the article is a striking example of journalistic capture; after discussing Summers’ ludicrous compensation ($5.2 million for a year in which he worked one day a week), the piece follows the lead of its sources in functioning to allay concerns about potential conflicts of interest that Summers faces as the chief architect of Obama’s economic policies.

Ironically, given Summers’ infamous remarks on women and science, the article was written by Louise Story, the same journalist who once “reported” that more women with Ivy League degrees were choosing to become stay-at-home moms. Jack Shafer of Slate immediately called that one out as a “bogus trend story,” pointing to its reliance on nebulous “weasel words,” and the piece subsequently became a favorite punching bag of media critics.

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